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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27937712">The Homecoming</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian'>OldShrewsburyian</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Adulthood of Jack Harkaway [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Foyle's War</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode: s06e03 The Hide, Family Bonding, Gen, Light Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War II, Step-parents, Tea</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:14:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,636</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27937712</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>James Devereaux is released from prison, and returns to White Friars. He and his stepmother attempt to negotiate a version of normality in the aftermath of James' release and Sir Charles' arrest.</p><p>This is marked as the first installment of a series because I have a number of ideas about James ("Jack") Devereaux, but I think they are better suited to standalone fics than to a project with a single arc.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Adulthood of Jack Harkaway [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2045807</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Homecoming</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I've wanted to write for these characters for ages, and I've finally figured out how I want to do it! I read Sir Charles as emotionally abusive, so be aware that that colors how I write of his family's reactions to him.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <i>The matter was not ended here, however. — Jack Harkaway’s Boy Tinker Among the Turks</i>
  </p>
</div>When James Devereaux returns to White Friars, he walks from the nearest bus stop. He has nowhere else to go. He tries to think of it as home. He has, it is true, no other; but that which boys at school and men at war meant when they said <i>home,</i> eyes shining… that has always seemed strange and remote to him. If <i>home</i> is anything, he thinks, as the Palladian facade comes into view, it is the memory of his mother’s laughter.<p>His stepmother is standing in the drive. He sees the breath she takes as he comes closer, his worldly goods in the duffel slung over his shoulder, his inheritance before him. “James!” She takes a step forward, makes a strange, spasmodic gesture with her hands, as if wondering whether to embrace him.</p><p>“Stepmother,” he says formally. He sets down his bag on the gravel and, remembering his adolescent rigidity and her wounded patience, takes her bony hands in his and leans to kiss her on both cheeks.</p><p>“Oh, James,” she says. He does not know how to respond to that. He has no reassurances. “Welcome home,” she says. Before he can stop himself, he has taken two steps hastily backwards.</p><p>“Yes, well.” He swallows. “Shall we go inside?”</p><p>The hall is no more welcoming than he remembers. Vast and symmetrical, it insists on the glories of a vanished empire. Suitable enough. </p><p>“I had your old room prepared,” says his stepmother; she does not meet his eyes. “I don’t know if, after your journey, you want any tea or…” She trails off, uncharacteristically irresolute.</p><p>“Tea,” says James. He is suddenly conscious of being almost unbearably thirsty. “Tea would be nice.”</p><p>He leaves his duffel at the foot of the stairs, and follows her into the yellow room. </p><p>“I’ll just go see,” she says, when they are both still standing amid the ottomans, the scrupulously brushed chairs. “We don’t really have a staff these days, but Mrs. Lewes will be in the kitchen.”</p><p>He manages something like a smile for her, and is left alone with the portraits of his ancestors. It is almost impossible to avoid the windows, with their magnificent views of the gardens and the lakes. James paces uneasily. He supposes that she meant it as a kindness, bringing him here, to the heart of the house, welcoming him as its owner and its heir. He shudders. </p><p>When his stepmother returns, she is carrying the tray herself, and James is not sure how long he has been standing in the middle of the room. He takes the tray from her; he is pleased that his hands are steady as he does so. A curious expression comes into her face, as if she is trying not to say <i>oh, James</i> again.</p><p>“Shall I pour out?” Her voice wavers. He is grateful that she does not attempt to be cheerful.</p><p>“Please.”</p><p>James watches his stepmother pour tea and wonders, not for the first time, what led her to marry his father. Sir Charles. She has always been straight-backed and sharp-boned and dignified—the least likely person, he would have thought, to be taken in by his father’s florid and rather unctuous charm. </p><p>He is not sure that he can trust his voice, but <i>I noticed</i>, he wants to say. <i>I noticed, and it was kind of you.</i> “Thank you.” It comes out slightly wrong, abrupt; she looks up, startled. James swallows, and adds: “For sparing me Mrs.-Lewes-in-the-kitchen.”</p><p>“Oh.” She does not color visibly. She does not even smile, really, but the corners of her mouth and the line of her jaw relax a little. “She’s not really a gossip,” says his stepmother, scrupulously fair. </p><p>“No.” He does not say: <i>with my father’s temper, you’d take care that she wouldn’t be.</i> He reminds himself to take up the teacup with the handle held delicately, as he was taught in this house, not with its porcelain fragility enveloped in his hand. (Some of the men had brought back, once, a partial set of Meissen, miraculously spared. He had cradled the blue-and-gold cup—cheap schnapps splashed into it—as if he could save it from future violence; as if he could offer it to the vanished owners, to the universe, as a plea: see, not all is lost. Say that not all is lost.)</p><p>“James?” says his stepmother, and he starts slightly.</p><p>“Sorry.”</p><p>She murmurs a faint dismissal of this apology, the smile of the perfect hostess on her lips. But she cannot hide the distress in her eyes.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” says James again, moistening his lips, “I didn’t hear.”</p><p>“I’m afraid,” she says, “that they’ll expect to see you—us—in church on Sunday.”</p><p>“Ah.”</p><p>“If you’d rather not, I can make your excuses; I’m sure that under the circumstances…”</p><p>“No. No,” he says again, trying for a different tone of voice, “that’s fine.”</p><p> “More tea?”</p><p>“Thank you.”</p>
<hr/><p>She leaves him, tactfully, to his own devices; with something like amusement he reflects that she is perfectly gracious and perfectly correct, if imperfectly sure of what to do with him. Though restless, James find himself loath to ramble in the grounds. Instead, he runs himself a bath. While he waits for the tub to fill, he tries to remember the last time he bathed. Had it been here? Had it been in a daze, in some London hotel, in the early days of the war?</p><p>Agnes’ slightly chipped clawfoot bath had been a joke of her letters, the Edwardian relic shared among her fellow-lodgers in the Brighton house. <i>Daisy has a date on Saturday—another American—so I’ve traded my bath night for washing up duty again.</i> Or: <i>It seems silly, sometimes, to keep up the same habits as before the war… as if I’d care about the last time I washed my hair if we were bombed, or invaded! But come home, and I’ll call in all the bath nights I’ve traded with the girls who are walking out with their young men (or, in the case of Daisy, several.) Come home, and we’ll wash the war away.<i> James stays in the tub as the water cools and the light fades. At last, he changes hastily, and goes down to partake of a dinner for which he has no appetite.</i></i></p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“You needn’t dress,” his stepmother had said, and thus his dinner jacket remains in mothballs. At least this way, James thinks, he is spared having to see whether or not it fits him still. Even his plain dark suit, less rigorously tailored, seems to hang awkwardly now. The shared meal is chiefly characterized by a weary if not uncompanionable silence.</i>
  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“The coffee’s only imitation,” says his stepmother apologetically, when they have finished.</i>
  </i>
</p><p>“Doesn’t matter.” He hesitates for a moment, then gestures with the decanter. “Do you care for port?”</p><p>Her color comes up, a little unevenly. “I do."
</p><p>He rises before she can, fills her glass without comment, returns to his seat and raises his glass in salute. Her answering gesture is not quite timid, but precise: as if sketched with a long-ago schoolmistress’ voice in her head: <i>if invited to partake, a lady must…</i></p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“Your father,” she says, before adding hastily, “Charles… he thought that taking port was unladylike.”</i>
  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“Ah.” They sip their port in silence. James fingers the stem of his glass. He cannot quite bring himself to apologize to her for what has happened, still less for being the agent of his father’s long deferred comeuppance. But she is owed an apology, for all that. “I’m sorry,” he says at last, “that we haven’t gotten to know each other better.”</i>
  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“Oh, James,” says his stepmother. She smiles tremulously. “So am I. But we’ll be able to change that, now. At least…” </i>
  </i>
</p><p>“Yes,” he says. It seems more polite than letting her finish, letting her blunder into an <i>if you like,</i> or falter into a wistful <i>I hope.</i> James takes a deep breath. He becomes conscious of being quite extraordinarily tired. “But tonight, if you’ll forgive me…”
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>“Of course.” They go upstairs together, strangely as if it were an already-shared ritual. He glances back at the port glasses on the table, thinks of the aftermaths of diplomatic meetings.</i>
  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>When they have parted, he closes his door on the rest of the house with a sense of relief. He undresses quickly and clumsily, and goes to bed in a room with familiar patterns of moonlight around the edges of the curtains. He is not aware of falling asleep; he wakes to an awareness of danger. His heart racing, he hears again the sound that woke him: a live thing, too close. Is it a stone, rattling on scree? Something—someone—moving suddenly among the trees? No, he is in a bed; someone in the next cell? He raises his eyes to the ceiling, and realizes that he is doubly mistaken. There are no other prisoners; there are no watchers in the night. There are only mice behind the paneling. But his heart still races.</i>
  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>
    <i>James forces himself not to reach under his pillow, where there will be no gun and no knife. He reaches instead for the bedside table, for the glass and the carafe. </i>
  </i>
</p><p>
 After a few minutes, he switches on the lamp, and takes up <i>Decline and Fall.</i> He strains his eyes to follow the conversations of the mild, self-interested, self-righteous men who whisk Paul Pennyfeather along between them. Names and arrangements of furniture are repeated in soothing cadence. Paul tempers discretion with deceit, and goes to the pub, and listens to his colleague’s idea of equity. <i>One goes through four or five years of perfect hell…</i> James nods over the book, and falls asleep with the lamp burning.
</p>
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